Blame our faulty brains. Luckily, there are ways to get out of the most common mental traps.
Until there’s a safe and widespread vaccine rollout, the greatest weapons we have against the pandemic are the decisions we make every day. The bad news about this is that humans are notoriously lousy decision-makers.
Why, though? Blame our faulty brains: All of us possess cognitive biases that make it difficult to think rationally when faced with questions involving risk. Should we dine at a restaurant? Is it a good idea to send our kids back to school? Can we safely visit our folks to celebrate Thanksgiving?
While our instincts may be to go with the less-than-optimal choice, we’re not…
Rollover effect| noun| role-over • iff-etc
- : a technique usually used in website and UX design wherein an image, text, or button is replaced by another image, text, or any other element upon hovering your cursor over it.
- : this technique can increase the visual momentum by presenting brief explanations just below the relevant element (for example if you hover over “visual momentum” you will see the entire hyperlink to another one of my articles). The user would otherwise find the information on a separate page and therefore need to expend cognitive resources to integrate information and switch pages.
The…
Automation Complexity| noun| aw-toe-may-shun • caum-plex-ity
- : refers to a side-effect of increased automation in systems wherein the increased complexity of automation alienates the user from the understanding of its functioning.
- : a high degree of automation complexity can lead to the issue of observability with figuring out hidden bugs in the code and ascertaining why the automation is performing a particular action. This can be particularly important in automation failures and time-critical situations.
- : good human factors and UX design can resolve some of these problems by representing underlying system functioning on the interface so that operators can solve problems using the presented representations.
Anirudh Kedia
Aviation Geek | Grad student — writing to take a break from writing | Making Human Factors accessible one article at a time
